A synopsis of the story

Joan Walden is a single mother of two children, Sally and Conrad. Joan works at Humberfloob Real Estate Agency which is run by an obsessively compulsive Mr. Humberfloob. Joan is successful at her career but Humberfloob is very demanding, expecting her to come in to work at any time. Joan has a neighbour Larry who wants to marry her. He appears to be a successful businessman but that is far from the truth. Also Larry can’t stand Conrad and is forever trying to persuade Joan to send him off to Military School. Joan is called in unexpectedly to work on the day when she has to host an important business party that evening. As a last resort she calls a Mrs. Kwan to baby-sit and forbids the children from going into the lounge room as it must be kept clean.

Once Mrs. Kwan is installed she immediately falls asleep and is totally oblivious to the proceedings of the day. It’s raining outside and Sally and Conrad are bored in their bedroom, when they hear a noise in the closet. They go to investigate and discover the Cat in the Hat. At first they are terrified but soon come to realise that the Cat is not going to hurt them. The Cat measures them both with his ‘phunometer’ which measures how much fun they are. It reveals that Sally is a control freak and Conrad is a rule breaker.

The Cat sets out to amend this situation and the day turns into one of much mayhem and hilarity. The Cat also introduces Thing One and Thing Two who absolutely trash the house. Then Conrad opens the trunk he’s told not to and the house turns into a purple fantasy land. The children are then frantic to find the lock to close the trunk with but Conrad has placed it around the dog’s neck. Their hunt takes them all around the town and Larry gets involved in it too, trying to cause more trouble for Conrad. The day takes some very unexpected turns and Conrad and Sally have to learn to work together.

Research shows that children are at risk of learning that violence is an acceptable means of conflict resolution when violence is glamourised, performed by an attractive hero, successful, has few real life consequences, is set in a comic context and / or is mostly perpetrated by male characters with female victims, or by one race against another.

Repeated exposure to violent content can reinforce the message that violence is an acceptable means of conflict resolution. Repeated exposure also increases the risks that children will become desensitised to the use of violence in real life or develop an exaggerated view about the prevalence and likelihood of violence in their own world.

There is some violence in this movie, mostly set in a comic context, including the following:

Conrad slides down the stairs and crashes into a car.

The Cat fights with an elephant’s trunk.

The Cat flushes the fish down the toilet.

The Cat threatens another Cat with a cleaver with which he then chops his own tail off.

Thing One and Thing Two fight on the sofa.

The babysitter gets dragged down the stairs banging her head continuously. Also she gets hung up in a wardrobe by a clothes hanger.

The dog gets thrown out of the window.

The Cat hides as a ‘piñata’ and hangs from a rope while the children at a birthday party all beat him with plastic baseball bats. He gets hit in the groin.

Children aged five to eight will also be frightened by scary visual images and will also be disturbed by depictions of the death of a parent, a child abandoned or separated from parents, children or animals being hurt or threatened and / or natural disasters.

Children in this age group may also be disturbed by scenes mentioned above.